Saturday, December 31, 2016

12.31.16 12:15 AM ET

Long regarded as the understudy of the infamous KGB and its successor services, Russian military intelligence is now front and center in the Moscow-Washington showdown.

It says something about the ingrained rivalry between the various fiefdoms of Russian espionage that the founder of Soviet military intelligence, Leon Trotsky, had an ice-ax driven into his head in Mexico by an agent of Stalin’s foreign intelligence service.

Ever since, in the long dark history of Soviet and Russian spookery the military’s Main Intelligence Directorate, or GRU, has been overshadowed by a succession of more powerful, famous and infamous organizations known by a succession of acronyms, most famously as the KGB and, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the FSB and SVR.

But on Thursday the GRU suddenly emerged from the shadows when the waning Obama administration imposed sanctions on the four top-ranking GRU officers for their roles hacking the private email correspondence of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chief John Podesta. The entire spy agency, along with the FSB, was also sanctioned institutionally.

The Glavnoye razvedyvatel’noye upravleniye, as it is formally known, was founded in 1920, assuming the mantle of its prior incarnation, the Registration Directorate for Coordination of Efforts of All Army Intelligence Agencies, after the Red Army's fiasco invasion of Poland that year. Its first director, Yan Berzin, was appointed by Felix Dzerzhinsky, the inaugural head of Lenin's Cheka. Yet somehow, unlike the KGB, the GRU managed to endure the rocky transition from communism to democracy to authoritarian kleptocracy with its acronym intact.

In Soviet times, as historian and journalist John Barron argued, the GRU was wholly subordinate to the KGB. As Barron noted in a revealing 1974 book, “The GRU may not employ anyone, either as an officer or agent, without prior clearance from the KGB. In addition, the KGB uses coercion and bribery to recruit informants among GRU officers, just as it does in every other element of Soviet society. Moreover, the KGB can veto any proposed assignments of GRU personnel abroad.”

But historically there were plenty of those assignments to be made. “Virtually all Soviet military attaches belong to the GRU,” Barron observed, “as do a large number of the Soviet citizens staffing Aeroflot offices abroad.”

When Donald Trump’s spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway tells CNN, as she did Thursday, that Obama’s sanctions on GRU officers are pointless because the GRU operatives don’t travel much to the United States or keep any assets here, she’s missing the point. The heads of the GRU are comfortably ensconced in Moscow, but their networks overseas are extensive, very likely including now as in Soviet times the military attachés serving in the Russian embassy in Washington, D.C., and the Russian Permanent Mission to the United Nations in New York.

Today it is believed that the GRU has an enormous network of agents abroad, built up over decades and rivaling that of the SVR, Russia’s contemporary foreign intelligence service.

“The GRU has been always seen as a more competent, adventurous and ruthless service in comparison with the KGB or SVR,” said Andrei Soldatov, a Russian journalist who has covered his country’s intelligence services extensively.

In the early 1960s, the GRU was very much on the mind of the Kennedy administration.

For starters, Oleg Penkovsky, a GRU colonel and a close friend of then-KGB chairman Ivan Serov, was a double agent being jointly run by Britain’s MI6 and the CIA.

He had passed critical intelligence to the West about Soviet military capabilities and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s overseas plans, particularly the bold decision to station nuclear missile bases in Cuba, which Khrushchev hoped the U.S. wouldn’t notice until it was too late. Washington had uncovered the construction of the missile bases on its own, using U-2 spy planes, but Penkovsky provided the original plans and other corroborating material.

When Penkovsky’s betrayal was discovered it cost him his life, and cost Serov his job. In the aftermath the KGB chairman’s replacement, Lt. Gen. Petr Ivashutin, staffed the GRU with KGB men rather than military officers, making it even more of a suzerainty.

Yet the Main Intelligence Directorate had its marked successes, too. Beginning in May 1961, Col. Georgi Bolshakov, who posed as the head of the Washington bureau of the Soviet news agency TASS, was assigned to palaver on a biweekly basis with Robert Kennedy.

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As we know from the Mitrokhin File, an enormous tranche of handwritten internal documents smuggled out of the Soviet Union by KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin, Bolshakov cultivated the U.S. attorney general, who happened to be the younger brother of the president.

As Mitrokhin and his co-author Christopher Andrew wrote in The Sword and the Shield, “Bolshakov succeeded in persuading Robert Kennedy that, between them, they could short-circuit the ponderous protocol of official diplomacy, ‘speak straightly and frankly without resorting to the politickers’ stock-in-trade propaganda stunts’ and set up a direct channel of communication between President Kennedy and First Secretary Khrushchev. Forgetting that he was dealing with an experienced intelligence professional who had been instructed to cultivate him, the president’s brother became convinced that ‘an authentic friendship grew’ between him and Bolshakov.”

Robert Kennedy himself attested to the closeness of the relationship and later confronted Bolshakov, who had insisted that Khrushchev had no such belligerent designs on America’s hemisphere, when the evidence produced from Penkovsky and the U-2s made those denials untenable. The GRU colonel had been running a careful game of deception directly with the two most powerful men in the United States.

Finally, it was Main Intelligence Directorate, not the KGB, that snagged the highest-ranking American ever recruited by the Soviet Union. An intelligence advisor to the U.S. Army Chief of Staff, Lt. Col. Willian Henry Whalen, was arrested by the FBI in 1962 after having provided his handlers with a gold mine of extremely sensitive information about U.S. military capabilities and the thinking of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, much of it having to do with the familiar subject of how the U.S. gathers intelligence electronically. For all the severity of this breach, Whalen served just six years in prison.

The GRU’s fortunes waned considerably after the Cold War and, as of only three years ago, it was considered inside Russia as a mostly spent force. It had been severely weakened after 2008, some say, because KGB veteran Vladimir Putin was fiercely critical of the GRU’s performance during the invasion of Georgia that same year. Others attribute the locust years to a package of “reforms” which reduced the GRU’s staff by 1,000 and cut the agency divisions from eight to five. That is in the wider context of the General Staff itself being more than halved in size. Still, as other spy services’ coffers grew, the GRU’s budget was conspicuously diminished.

All that changed very quickly, however.

“Now they’ve come back,” a former CIA operative stationed in Moscow told The Daily Beast. “They’ve come back because Putin, like Stalin, likes to have a variety of organs around him that compete with each other. And their roles often overlap with the roles of the Chekists from the FSB or SVR.”

From Putin’s point of view, the GRU had one unmitigated victory: the seizure and annexation of Crimea in 2014.

More than those other two services, the GRU has been responsible for running Russia’s dirty war in Ukraine, making it Putin’s suddenly preferred “secret weapon,” as Mark Galeotti, a specialist on the Russian security services, wrote in Foreign Policy in 2014.

The Crimea takeover, he noted, was “based on plans drawn up by the General Staff’s Main Operations Directorate that relied heavily on GRU intelligence. The GRU had comprehensively surveyed the region, was watching Ukrainian forces based there, and was listening to their communications.”

And of the so-called little green men who mounted that takeover and later turned up to try a repeat performance in Donetsk and Lugansk in eastern Ukraine, many were actually officers in GRU Spetsnaz with extensive battlefield experience in Afghanistan, Chechnya, and the Balkans. An early giveaway was the characteristic Vintorez rifle that only the GRU Spetsnaz troops are outfitted with. Then came sanctions.

Igor Strelkov, the former commander of the “Donetsk People’s Republic,” was blacklisted by the European Union as a GRU operative, even though he has elsewhere stated on social media and in public speeches that he is a former FSB officer.

Harder evidence of the GRU’s expansive involvement in the Ukraine theater came in May 2015 when Evgeniy Erofeev and Alexandr Alexandrov, two GRU commandos arrested by the Poroshenko government for their orchestration of units in Lugansk, were exchanged for Nadiya Savchenko, the Ukraine army aviation pilot whose capture on native Ukrainian soil and subsequent show trial in Russia—complete with her flipping off the judge and waging hunger strikes—made her both a cause célèbre and an elected parliamentarian back home. Swapping a prisoner of an undeclared war for two spies otherwise disavowed as agents of that war was a particularly fine touch, even for Vladimir Putin.

Also noteworthy is the fact that the only Russian intelligence head to be sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department for the invasion of Ukraine was Maj. Gen. Igor Sergun, another former embassy attaché, whose appointment three years earlier as the lowest-ranking head of the GRU struck many as curious. Sergun died last year, apparently of heart failure (although naturally there are rumors in both Ukraine and Russia that he was murdered for a less-than-ideal managing of the “separatists” in the Donbass), and his replacement Igor Valentinovich Korobov now finds himself on a similar sanctions list, along with his three top deputy chiefs, this time for interfering with an American presidential election.

As it happens, that interference and ongoing hostilities in Europe share a common participant.

Two weeks ago, the intelligence firm Crowdstrike, found that the GRU had honed its cyberwarfare capability on the Ukrainian battlefield by delivering malware to an Android app created by a Ukrainian officer, Yaroslav Sherstyuk, to aid howitzer crews in targeting. It was distributed on military forums from the summer of 2014 through 2016. The app contained a new Android variant of malware implant called X-Agent, associated by Crowdstrike with “Fancy Bear,” the very same GRU team the firm earlier identified as having hacked the DNC and John Podesta’s emails.

Thus, Russian military intelligence has been able to monitor not only the approximate GPS positions of Ukrainian soldiers, but also gather their SMS messages, call logs, contact lists, and internet data. The scale of the infection is unknown. The creator of the app claimed that it had around 9,000 users, all operating the D-30 howitzer (a mainstay of Ukrainian artillery). There is no data indicating how many of those installations were the compromised versions.

This revelation, if confirmed, makes one wonder if the speed with which East Aleppo was retaken two weeks ago by pro-Assad forces in Syria similarly owes to electronic sabotage. Even before Russia’s direct military intervention in Syria, in September 2015, there were reports of GRU officers embedded with the regime. In one underreported case, a “former” operative, now a judge, was shot in the face while “vacationing” in the war zone.

Since Putin’s second war got underway, the duties of the GRU have become if not quite transparent then less plausibly deniable. One of the dozen or so Russian military fatalities sustained in Syria was that of Captain Fyodor Zhuravlev, a GRU special forces operator who was killed in action in November 2015. We can’t know how many assets the agency has since sent to Syria, but a likely estimate would be in the hundreds.

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Tragedy struck outside of Meek Mill’s concert in Wallingford, Connecticut on December 30, where four men were shot — two of them fatally. Meek was thankfully not hurt or involved in the incident. It’s unclear what prompted the shooting.

Shots rang out outside of the Oakdale Theater, where Meek Mill was performing, just as his show was winding down, according to local Wallingford police who spoke to ABC News. The two men who survived the shooting have non-life threatening injuries; they were taken to Hartford Hospital and Yale New Haven Hospital for treatment. Meek had reportedly just walked off the stage at Oakdale, at about 11:15pm ET, when the gunfire erupted at the venue’s front entrance. The rapper was thankfully unharmed.

Wallingford Police Lt. Cheryl Bradley told <a href="http://HollywoodLife.com" rel="nofollow">HollywoodLife.com</a>:“This is an ongoing investigation and we will continue to investigate this shooting vigorously. We haven’t released the victims’ identities. We don’t believe Meek Mill was involved and as far as we know he wasn’t injured and was not on scene when we arrived. We don’t know if Nicki Minaj was present. We believe there was an altercation between two parties that led to the incident that occurred in the Parking lot Oakdale Theatre.”

“We received a 911 call from an employee at the Oakdale Theatre … The caller reported that he was outside of the Oakdale with a victim who was shot in the leg,” Lt. Bradley told ABC. “Our units responding determined that there were actually 4 victims, 2 with non-life-threatening injuries … 2 victims determined to be deceased. Everything occurred outside of the Oakdale, it appeared to be near closing, the closing of the event.”

Police do not have a suspect in custody at this time. As of Saturday morning, December 31, a massive manhunt was underway. “At this time, we are looking into possible leads, suspect vehicles, descriptions,” Lt. Bradley said.

This story is still developing. <a href="http://HollywoodLife.com" rel="nofollow">HollywoodLife.com</a> will keep you updated with any new information.

HollywoodLifers, our thoughts are with the shooting victims in Connecticut.

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On October 7, 2016, Secretary Johnson and Director Clapper issued a joint statement that the intelligence community is confident the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from U.S. persons and institutions, including from U.S. political organizations, and that the disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks are consistent with the Russian-directed efforts. The statement also noted that the Russians have used similar tactics and techniques across Europe and Eurasia to influence public opinion there.

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Russian President Vladimir Putin has defied the long-standing, hard rules of the game in handling espionage affairs by failing to follow the Russian Foreign Ministry’s recommendation that Russia retaliate in a tit-for-tat manner to the Obama administration announcement of the expulsion of 35 Russian diplomats and various other sanctions against Russian officials and entities.

It is a surprising move on the Russian leader’s part. “While we reserve the right to respond, we will not drop to this level of irresponsible diplomacy, and we will make further steps to help resurrect Russian-American relations based on the policies that the administration of Trump will pursue,” the Russian president said in a statement on the Kremlin’s website.

Deferring direct and immediate retaliation is rare in the long annals of US-Russia spy-versus-spy history, and it is almost certainly not what President Barack Obama anticipated, in ordering U.S. retaliatory measures for alleged Russian hacking activity. Putin may also be awaiting further promised U.S. actions against Russia in the covert or overt spheres, which he will then be able to take into account in framing his response.

What is Putin thinking?

Viewing the hacking affair as a bitter end game between two presidents, Putin appears to be willing to concede some pieces on his chess board to Obama now, in order to buy time and position for a match that will be continued with a new U.S. president on January 20, 2017. In terms of increasing his flexibility, Putin seems willing to set aside immediate benefits of upholding past precedents to being patient in hopes of reaping greater future rewards.

Putin is turning the other cheek – tongue in cheek – to take a personal shot at Obama.

Putin is signaling his personal contempt for Obama by underscoring Russian refusal to deal with a lame duck president. Putin is studiously trying to dismiss whatever the Obama administration has in store in its response to Russia hacking. The degree to which the animosity between the two leaders has become personal was highlighted by Putin’s puckish announcement that U.S. diplomats and their children would be invited to the Kremlin for a Christmas and New Year’s party. Taking a shot at Obama for being willing to sacrifice the careers of U.S. diplomats for his own political purposes, Putin said, presumably tongue-in-cheek: “The diplomats who are returning to Russia will spend the New Year’s holidays with their families and friends. We will not create any problems for U.S. diplomats. We will not expel anyone. We will not prevent their families and children from using their traditional leisure sites during the New Year’s holidays. Moreover, I invite all children of U.S. diplomats accredited in Russia to the New Year and Christmas children’s parties in the Kremlin.”

Putin is reinforcing the Russian view that the hacking affair has been politicized for US domestic political reasons.

For now, Putin is unwilling to allow an escalating series of tit-for-tat measures to control the broader bilateral relationship, as the White House and many in Congress desire. The Russians have no doubt noted that the timing of the U.S. actions, the large number of expulsions, and the sanctions are not in line with precedents that have been sent set over decades in previous intelligence-related affairs. Historically speaking, intelligence-related problems between the US and Russia have been handled in a manner to minimize fallout from spy matters. In this case, the Russians have grounds, whether it is true or not, to view U.S. actions as being specifically intended to provoke a Russian response that will further damage US-Russian bilateral relations. If so, it is not in Putin’s interest to play to that agenda.

Putin is resisting being baited into taking counteractions that will tie the incoming president’s hands and ice US-Russian relations into a deep freeze.

By not retaliating immediately and proportionately, as is de rigueur in espionage-related matters, the Russian president is signaling that he is rejecting the terms of engagement that are being set by the Obama administration. Putin is making what he regards as a good will gesture, presumably with the hope and expectation that Donald Trump will respond in kind when he takes office. Putin’s nonresponse to the outgoing administration’s move is in essence his opening move in a new match with an incoming administration that has already expressed its opposition to the current US-Russia policy course.

Can President Trump improve US-Russian relations, in the aftermath of the Russian hacking affair?

The Kremlin will be watching Donald Trump’s first moves closely, from the day he takes office. So will Congress. So will the American people. The incoming administration’s willingness to uphold sanctions and other punitive measures against Russia will be a vital early signal for all parties as to the prospects of pursuing a more constructive, mutually beneficial relationship. Trump will have a delicate line to walk in signaling a desire for better relations with Russia while acting in a manner that safeguards U.S. interests. The new president simply can not escape the fact that Russia bears considerable responsibility for the dramatic deterioration in US-Russian relations. Ukraine. Syria. Russian hacking was only the final straw.

No concessions required – only constructive engagement

Fortunately for the new US president, constructive engagement does not necessitate being an apologist for Russian behavior, only being realistic in promoting U.S. interests. History has shown that in bridging the divide between the US and Russia, trust is not necessary – but mutual respect is essential. Mutual respect has been lamentably absent in the bilateral relationship for many years, and it must be restored through dialogue as a precondition for any improvement in ties. In framing a new approach, the US and Russia should first discuss principles. Some examples of what has worked in the past: Neither side should make concessions in areas of disagreement as a prerequisite for maintaining strong and continuous lines of communications. Channels of communication are always important to reduce the possibilities of greater misunderstanding and miscalculations. We should work to narrow our differences in all areas of disagreement, e.g., Ukraine, Syria, Ballistic Missile Defense, and NATO. In parallel, we should identify areas of shared concern and strengthen cooperation in those areas, e.g., terrorism, nuclear terrorism, and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Moreover, the US and Russia should strive not to hold cooperation over shared threats hostage to that which divides us.

Third time the charm?

Trump will begin his chess match with Putin from a position of strength. U.S. flexibility in engaging the Russians flows from the reality that the US remains the strongest military and economic power in the world. When Putin recently pronounced that, “We can say with certainty: We are stronger now than any potential aggressor,” he later clarified that this did not include the US, which he said he did not view as an “aggressor.” Whether this clarification is sincere, or not, Americans should not doubt American strength and resilience, in spite of any setbacks we have suffered. It is therefore contrary to U.S. interests to hype the threat by re-creating the Cold War paradigm as the basis for assessing Russia’s plans and intentions, and for responding in kind.

The new administration should look instead not to repeat the mistakes both sides made after the collapse of the USSR in 1991, and after the terrorist attacks on America on September 11, 2001. There were opportunities to set a new course after these ground shattering events, but for various reasons the relationship slipped back into a Cold War footing. Third time the charm? Can we work together in certain areas of mutual interest despite our differences? We did it at the height of the Cold War. With the benefit of history, we consider agreements to cooperate to be among our finest hours, such as the arms control agreements that stemmed from personal trust between Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev. We need inspired leadership once more to banish Islamic extremism from the face of the earth; work together to reduce nuclear, biological and chemical threats, and stabilize the Middle East; to defend US interests across the globe that increasingly depend on the degree to which the US and Russia can reduce areas of confrontation and increase cooperation.